currently have two PC's with XP installed that are connected by a USB crossover cable. On my 'main' PC I have all my folders/files that are share with the second computer, apache server, mysql server and printer. When both computers are switched on, from the second computer you can access the main computers directories that have been shared, print documents and via internet browser access the apache server.

Both computers connect directly to the internet via router. Therefore both computers have two network connects. The internet connection is DCHP and the IP address is assigned by my ISP.

The second network connection is for the USB cross over connection. In this case I have selected a fixed IP for both computer. For the 'main' computer the TCP/IP address is 192.168.1.100 and for the second computer the address is 192.168.1.101

I have configured the apache server on the main computer to use address 192.168.1.100. If you type 192.168.1.100 on both computers in the web browser you open the root directory of the server.

My plan is to substitute my main computer with a new computer with Linux but keep the above setup as much possible. I have installed Fedora 9 x64 and everything seems to be working correctly. Currently there is localhost.localdomain. I have a 'root' user and main user 'james'. The apache server is running correctly on 127.0.0.1.

Can anyone give my any advice to recreate the setup described above. I know I need to install samba. How do I need to configure different IP addressed for the various services?

dont really understand what you're trying to do. You just want to substitute your "main" pc with your new linux box and have it do exactly the same job?

i've never done usb networking so i can't help you with that element. as for everything else, i can't see any reason why the networking aspect shouldn't work out of the box so long as you're using dhcp.

if you want to give other users access to the files on the linux box you will have to use samba. Apache should already be listening on all interfaces if i recall correctly. if not, you need to add

Code:

BindAddress *

to your httpd.conf file to listen on all interfaces. alternatively, replace the "*" with the ip address of the interface you want to listen on

if you are sharing printer you should configure cups and which you can get to from http://localhost:631 if memory serves